Patrick M. Condon - Seven Rules for Sustainable Communities: Design Strategies for the Post Carbon World

The last of the rules introduced in chapter 1 is love one rule, love them all . The essence of a sustainable community is found in its integrated systems. It does no good if there are jobs close to home but the street network still frustrates moving by any means other than a car. It does no good to be a five-minute walk from commercial services and transit unless this system is scaled up to allow for reasonable access to walkable destinations at the other end of the trip. It does no good to have a linked system of recreation areas and parks if they are devastated by uncontrolled stormwater runoff from adjacent neighborhoods. The seven rules presented in this book are an attempt to simplify what might appear complex: the overlapping and interconnected nature of the body of the world and how we might heal it.

But the most cancerous illness in the body of the world is carbon, and how we seem hell bent on taking every bit of carbon locked up in the land since the carboniferous period and launching it into the ten-mile-thin band of our atmosphere. No responsible planner, architect, landscape architect, politician, or developer can escape the moral imperative to change the way he or she does business in response.

But change what? Make buildings more efficient? Make cars operate on batteries? Erect new windmills? Yes to all of the above, but that is not enough. No amount of technological fixing can solve this problem if our per capita energy use continues to grow, if our per capita automobile use continues to climb, if the percentage of our gross national product devoted to transportation systems of all types (not just cars) continues to increase, and if our way of building new communities ignores the fundamental rules of sustainable city planning. Even absent the climate change problem, our way of building cities is unsustainable. As William Rees says, if everyone on the planet lived like North Americans, it would take six planet earths to support itand this without even considering the carbon problem.

Equally blind are those who hypothesize wildly new forms of cities: growing food in skyscrapers, carbon-free monorails connecting every house, mining of oceans for food and materials, mega structures like concrete beehives for millions. Such proposals ignore the immense material costs of their outrageous proposals. The earth simply cannot supply the materials and absorb the waste from such a globewide urban transformation. The concrete alone would tip us into atmospheric carbon overload. We have no choice but to work from what we have, no matter where on earth we are, and rebuild it for this new emergency. I offer the streetcar city as a way to do that.

Whatever is the solution, we know for sure that the North American city will need a dramatic retrofit. According to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we have only fifty years to do itbut perhaps this fifty-year time frame is the most hopeful part of the message. In the fifty years between 1950 and 2000, the mechanics of the North American city changed entirely. Walking was replaced by driving, streetcars were replaced by buses and cars, community centers were transformed from key intersections in the grid where walking predominated to enclosed malls at the center of a dendritic infrastructure swarming with cars. It seems inconceivable that this transformation to every aspect of the city occurred so fast, but it did; and if we did all that in fifty years, then we can achieve a similar shift in the next fifty. But if we are to reduce our total carbon production by 80 percent, we had better start right away. New developments take ten years from proposal to occupation, city plans can take decades to realize, regional transportation plans typically have a thirty-year horizon, and natural systems can take fifty years or longer to heal.

Finally, there is a subtext to all of this, one that has been touched on here and there in this volume but was not central to the argument. These seven rules stand on their own as practical solutions to the crisis we face, but taken together they create a world that would necessarily manifest itself in experiential terms. The qualities of such a world would, I believe, show up as the very positive phenomena that Jane Jacobs isolated in her examination of New York (Jacobs, 1961): homes interface with the public realm in organic ways, the street becomes the milieu for social interaction, different demographic and cultural groups cross fertilize, moving through the city is communal, and nature is always within easy reach. Low-carbon, sustainable communities are just starting to emerge and to provide strong evidence that the qualities Jane Jacobs identified may be intrinsic to a well-built and intelligently designed sustainable community. But to explicate the qualitative phenomena of the sustainable low-carbon future would take another book, and this one ends here.